Cleaned and reconciled California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) price-posting data for research and public use.
Current release: Data through July 31, 2026
Includes information on data construction, variable definitions, coverage, cleaning procedures, and known limitations.Â
Annual .csv files are provided as compressed ZIP archives.
The California ABC requires alcoholic beverage manufacturers, importers, wholesalers, and other licensees to post wholesale prices. These public-use files organize and clean those postings to make them more suitable for economic and other quantitative research.
The underlying ABC records contain inconsistencies in product names, trade names, packaging descriptions, and other fields. The public-use data incorporate extensive cleaning, standardization, and reconciliation intended to improve consistency across products and over time.
New releases may incorporate both additional observations and improvements to the treatment of historical records.
Although substantial effort has been devoted to cleaning and validating these data, they should not be treated as error-free.
The original ABC records sometimes contain typographical errors, inconsistent naming, ambiguous product descriptions, duplicate or near-duplicate entries, and other irregularities. Some historical classifications or product matches necessarily involve judgment.
Researchers should independently verify observations that are especially important to their analysis against the original California ABC records whenever feasible.
Please consult the README / Data Dictionary for additional details on construction, cleaning, and known limitations.
These files are provided for research, teaching, and other public-interest uses.
If you use the cleaned data in academic research, reports, presentations, or other published work, please acknowledge the California ABC Product Data Project and cite the version of the data used.
Cole, Matthew T. California ABC Product Data Project. Public-use cleaned California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control price-posting data, release through July 31, 2026.
Questions, corrections, or reports of possible data issues are welcome.